


The Bloodworm:

by TheLightdancer



Series: The Omniverse Tales [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Lovecraftian Shenanigans
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-06-10
Updated: 2020-07-03
Packaged: 2021-03-04 02:20:47
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 4
Words: 9,105
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24635980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheLightdancer/pseuds/TheLightdancer
Summary: It's Mardi Gras season in Lake Charles, Louisiana. A businessman who made a deal with a figure he only dimly understood finds that his deals come back to haunt him when two entities make their return to his world intent to recoup a bargain he sought to cheat. Other entities seeking a vacation take poorly to the disruption of their quiet time.
Relationships: Original Female Character/Original Female Character, Original Female Character/Original Male Character
Series: The Omniverse Tales [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1781269





	1. Prologue/All Cats are Grey

In the Night All Cats are grey:

 _There are many things in existence that cannot be reckoned by human eyes. The sounds of the stars, the virulence of plague....and the children of Kelzhandar in all their_ _legions_ -Abdul Hazred, _Al-Azif_

The marshes of Cameron Parish, 3:15 AM February 20th 2017:

The world had trembled in the wake of strange phenomena. The sky had somehow rippled and shaken like a pool with a stone skipped over it. There were many strange phenomena in the heavens, but there were no explanations under any known laws of physics to account for this, nor for the way that this phenomenon had a mirror effect with the clouds and the Sun itself on the daytime side of planet Earth. Nor for the strange dreams that had stalked the nightside, dreams of a towering being clad in armor like a strange kind of flayed hide. She wore a black cape, like a twisted and warped mirror of a superhero. By her side was a being that came and went in clouds of smoke, dressed in a deep black cape with a quasi-avian hood, her eyes gleaming pools of light that mirrored the other.

_That entity had a medium-brown skin, hair white as snow, and eyes that crackled with witchfire as her presence stamped itself on existence in ways that were impossible to describe. It was hard to say what in dreams that seemed more incoherent and fantastic than the usual kind of dreams made these seem real, but real they seemed. Great wars in the heavens and in reality at levels that the human brain lacked the aptitude to grasp. A smiling bloated titan on a Gilded Throne, eyes gleaming with the sickly light of murdered stars. Another being, clad in grey unpainted metal save a black ankh on her breastplate with skin like bone and eyes that gleamed with nine suns in the bone-hued face, hair flowing like liquid darkness._

_These gods were at war with each other and planets died and were broken. Galaxies died, or worse, became the ivory and gold endless nightmares longing for death and unable to die, the hapless playthings of the bloated thing on the great throne. The lightning-smoke of the being with nine suns, where it struck, brought only Nothingness and Non-Being, states that were their own brand of fear. And there was the thing with reddish skin and horrid stars and armor smeared in various-hued blood that bellowed in alien tongues and waded through a bow-shock of corpses that parted before it in a literal sea of blood and bone and entrails, eyes glowing with lights that gleamed with the elements of a predator._

The dreams and strangeness faded when two columns of light fell to Earth in the marshes of Cameron Parish, a mile from Lake Charles.

There was nothing there to witness the arrival, only the whistling of wind through marshlands and a few nocturnal creatures disturbed by their arrival. A shimmering column that was and wasn't like a mirage slammed into the ground with an impact like a peal of thunder, and from it rose the entity that stalked the dreams, warring with the other godlings of the latest set of multiversal beings that mastered all they were and all they wished to be. She was not clad in the flayed-hide armor but in armor that seemed to be a brilliant gold. It was like the plate armor of a medieval knight and yet it wasn't, adorned in various areas with mystic sigils and occult symbolism that shifted if stared at too long in ways that drew the eye and froze what witnessed them.

Her skin was as rich in its brown hue as in the dreams, her hair tied in a ponytail that did not whip in the breeze like the hair of a normal being beholden to physics would, neither did her cape. On a night with strong winds, this would have disconcerted any who witnessed her arrival, as would the reality that her eyes were pupilless and seemed to glow with a brilliant light in the nighttime bright enough to dwarf the lights of a car or truck, and yet they were not blind. She smiled, sharp fanged teeth her only real hint of her non-human ancestry at this point, letting her size 'shrink' from her usual twenty-five feet in height to a 'mere' five and a half feet tall, losing nothing in power and gaining much in simple ability to fit in.

Her armor transformed into a golden-hued pair of slacks and a silver shirt adorned with a skull and sleeves that were marked in hazard stripes.

In a cloud of smoke the other entity appeared, shrinking likewise before she fully left it. Her skin was a light pink hue, the usual hue of a Caucasian human as the United States would have categorized it. The aura of menace and certain fundamental _wrongnesses_ of her form, however....her eyes displayed at points a reddish hue that was not reflection of light but glowed with a curious kind of gleam that did not obey the properties of true light. This glow drank in darkness and seemed to relish it. Her fingers were overly long, her limbs subtly off in proportions in a way that would have led the self-proclaimed decent human beings of the nearby city to shudder. Her cheeks were soft but the angle of her nose and her nostrils was not that of a human being, nor an entity that truly needed to breathe. Her teeth too were sharp, but all of them with a vicious serration that no natural entity would have possessed for dentition in a human jawline. The rest of her seemed normal enough, particularly from a distance, and certainly to the sister who looked at her with a crooked grin. Most blatantly, her voice had a curious element of resonance to it. The infrasound was very low, almost elephantine, and elements of three other voices were interwoven, as she stretched her arms, her usual outfit transformed into a pair of jeans and a crop top. 

_Why out here in the marshes, Karlee?_

If her voice interwove two others and echoed with that curious infrasound, the brown-skinned woman's voice was a voice that did not speak merely to the physical ears but within the soul, as much a metaphysical utterance of Existence made manifest as anything else. It was a voice of shadows and the creaking of boards in the night, the whispers of the wind that echoed with voices more than the poor concepts of physics and biology were adept to grasp.

**Why not? Wouldn't do to appear before some drunkard who might tell things and make the story that much more boring and quickly told, would it, Rach?**

_Blackbird rolled her eyes, a reddish flash recurring in them._

_Again with this story concept, sister._

**Ah, but it is true. All the world's a stage and even we who bestride Existence and reshape it in our image and in our likeness but merely players. The dreams of a Blind Idiot God, absolute power with a minimum of restraint and the only kind of being arrogant enough to dream up such forces, such living storms that as all storms do stride into realms that dared not dream until dreams became nightmares.**

Rachel's look was hooded.

_Be that as it may, if we are going to spend time on this pretense of mortal life...._

Karlee snorted.

**We took enough risks with the truths of our arrival made known.**

She pointed north.

**Up there, in that little strip of a town with the pretensions to call itself a city are three other entities like us. No less a set of entities than three of the Oversoul of the Hammer of Doom.**

Rachel's eyes widened.

_Then why are we here at all?_

Karlee grinned roguishly.

**I refuse to allow some jumped-up country doctor to bargain with me and think he can cheat me. Besides, I believe my dear sister's loves are not here to fight, were that so they would be here now.**

Her hand waved around, reality holding its breath, the force of the motion sending a gale that flattened some of the reeds along the bank and caused a brief appearance of whitecaps in the placid water.A long moment of silence even by mortal standards followed and the winds resumed their normal state of affairs. No entities made their appearance in the depths of the wetlands, no Jotunn of Muspelheim, no living arsenal, no red-haired brawler with green eyes that in anger glowed as neon pools of coiled power like greenish suns of their own. Only the rustle of wind in wetlands and the cry of birds, and the whine of mosquitoes that clustered around both of them as they sought to try to bite flesh they could not penetrate and the impact on their bodies destroyed them. 

Rachel's mouth jutted out slightly as she lowered her head, eyes now flashing with that night-drinking crimson, fists clenching. Then she shook her head, muttering a few choice phrases in Yiddish, which Karlee responded to with a curt: 

**Afen yam.**

Both snorted.

_Very well._

With that the two vanished in a shimmering distortion of reality, appearing at the office of a Holiday Inn and Suites, the bleary-eyed clerk on duty not understanding why the strangely dressed pair of lesbians, as he quite erroneously assumed, seemed to manifest out of thin air at 3:15 in the morning, nor the elements in their voices that made objects seem to rattle, nor why the strange dream-voiced woman with white hair was so very convincing that she managed to get a room in the hotel for free. It was all very surrealistic, and the only thing that made it clear that it was not a dream was that the cameras, the next day, showed a pair of women literally seeming to materialize out of thin air before room 221, checking in, and that the voices of both of them produced subtle jerking and trembling in the camera monitoring the floor.

In a house on the corner of Lake Street and University street, just near a bar that was seeing the latest attempt of a businessman to try to make a go of things, a mystic 'alarm clock' began to glow and a doctor awoke with a whimper of fear.

The monsters had come back.


	2. The Conqueror, Worm

_HAMPTON INN, LAKE CHARLES:_

Vincent Smith yawned and stretched, still awed at how even so long after his transformation, no.....his ascension from the merely human beyond the merely superhuman or even the divine that the little things of his new powers stood out to him. His full form was twenty five feet tall and weighed enough that a full herd of elephants tied to a rope and trying to pull him would die of heart failure before he so much as scuffed the dust. Yet here he was 'merely' seven feet tall and built with enough bulk that a professional wrestler, one of the more curious entertainments on this kind of Earth, would have steered clear. He looked around, briefly shifting his face to its true form, half of it reflecting his flesh, newly shaven scalp dull in the absence of light, half of it a kind of living metal of a hue only slightly darker than his flesh. His lips were the normal lips of a Black man with very dark skin, as was his right eye. The left eye was a metallic gleaming red that as with his eye of flesh saw with a multiplicity of senses. He chose consciously to see only what the visible light spectrum as a baseline human would define it would show him. 

To his left still dozed a form that looked strangely human in certain ways but not in others. Her hair was not visible when she slept for it was, even in this form, more the woven power of primordial fire doing a fairly good job stimulating it. He was as dark as brown could get, dark enough he was grateful for his ascension. Even in his world after it had overthrown white supremacy when the Blue Fire came and the wave of pogroms stirred by old hatreds of white people met people entirely capable not only of fighting back but undoing the destructive impulses wielded against them, those with dark skin had a worse time than those with lighter skin. It was easier to overthrow the old order than to entirely do away with the mindsets. Yet looking at Yuri sleeping, amazed that the golden-armored berserker with the sword of fire could look so human and vulnerable, he saw someone that made clear that even very dark brown is still brown. Her skin was the hue of molten magma, something visibly non-human. Yet some sorcery that was never visible to himself, nor to his other love who was waking up and yawning herself, scratching herself under her right boob and groaning: 

_Fucking boob sweat,_ before staggering to a shower, his eyes briefly traversing to watch her more pinkish body moving. His gaze returned to Yuri. The magma-hue was a fascinating and small-scale illustration of a nature that when fully unleashed could quite literally boil away oceans with its sheer heat, physics be damned. 

Yuri's eyes began to open and she looked at Vincent, eyes briefly blazing into their true molten reddish heat. 

_**Why do you insist on watching me sleep when you get up first?** _

**Well, Marianne does shower first and it's not like I have the need to piss or anything. Benefit of ascension, that.**

Yuri snorted. 

**_Yeah......something to be said for that. But still._ **

Vincent shrugged. 

**What can I say? I'm here with two beautiful women on either side of me and us enjoying ourselves very fucking much.**

He leered slightly and reached over to lightly smack her on the ass. 

**Literally, even.**

Yuri rolled her eyes again. 

_**Neither of us need to shower, why does Firewind?** _

**I think she likes to make her humanity more real or something.**

The two soon got dressed, which was a much less challenging process when reality was a system to obey only on a whim. Vincent soon wore a shirt that had a Black Power fist on a brownish-yellow background and dress slacks. He was surprised to find that there was any coldness at all in a Louisiana winter, and were he less capable of defying biological and physics rules on a whim, he would have been distinctly underdressed. Instead he smirked and flexed his muscles looking at himself in the mirror. Yuri snorted again and he turned to see her, as she wore a shirt that was all black save the white face of a woman with a cup of coffee in front of her, a brilliant silver ankh visible between her neck and on the front of her shirt. The woman had an Eye of Horus under her left eye and a soft smile. She wore a knee-length skirt, and as Vince strode over to the door she preened herself, his eyes catching the image on her shirt. 

**Brown-noser** , Vince snorted. 

_**Oh hush. It's not like she's looking at this, she's having a nice time with Ka'ara and Erica, so.....** _

Yuri shrugged. 

Marianne took that point to step out of the shower, smiling at the other two, and then twirled and in a flash of light wore a light red T-shirt and a pair of high-rise shorts, as well as a light jacket. Her hair was naturally a very brilliant sheen of red, but against the hair on Yuri that quite literally materialized as long, flowing locks that extended halfway down her shoulder, Yuri grumbling as she took her hand and moved her bangs out of her face and put a small spell on them to keep them there. That hair seemed to glow (and indeed did) with a power like woven flames. The eyes that glowed with a brilliant fire instead seemed to have a crimson hue and to only glow with their full extent in the dark. 

_**So......now what?**_

**Next parade's tomorrow. Today.....I want to go sightseeing.**

_**Here, really? Not New Orleans or somewhere else?** _

**Yeah, here. It's a small town, and frankly, if some fucking redneck decides to start some shit it's not like any of us are at any real risk. I think it might even be funny.**

Marianne shook her head and then carefully with a slight flick of her finger styled her hair in a bun. 

_ So.....shall we?  _

Before they stepped out, Yuri stopped them by raising a hand. 

_**You also felt them arriving earlier this morning, didn't you?** _

**Of course. If they're not there to pick a fight with us, I'll leave them to whatever they're doing and I think we all should. Fighting is....boring, if that's all there is to life. Besides that one's unpredictable and I have no desire to get caught up in whatever she's doing unless it involves us.**

For a brief moment his face returned to its true state and both of his eyes seemed to glow with the same hue. 

**Of course if they do sucker us into it, on their heads be it.**

On that note they all strode out and went to what was less a car and more of an illusion that they were conforming to normality and its expectations. The truth of three beings that simply hovered in the air and did so in the posture of someone seated in a car for the amusement factor would have been at one stroke odd and banal and at another stroke potentially terrifying. And that would have become all too much like work. As it was, they got an amusement factor in how those who believed they were driving saw a Black man in a car with a Black woman and a white woman, both with brilliant red hair. The car was a Hummer with a very loud engine to their sight. In truth, it actually did feel relieving to not have to worry about great cosmic dramas or the whims of reality that occurred when those for whom the Stars were Right came to worlds and spoke and blessed the sons and daughters of humanity with boons that seemed wondrous and led to nightmares in the small hours of the morning. 

_GOOS CEMETERY, 9 AM:_

_Why here?_ Blackbird's question was genuine and her fingers gestured in a fashion that brought a bird falling from the sky with the tortured physics it created, and added a new kind of anomaly to bedevil in a most literal sense meteorologists who had to try to parse the impacts of the strange visitors upon the world. 

**Why not here?**

The Shadow-woman smirked. 

_This is a public area, there are cars all around here._

**My dear, these are mortals. They only see what they prefer to see so long as I will it thus. And for my own part, I find only a few things more pleasurable than the ability to do the grand public sorcery thing in plain sight with mortals convinced that all we are is a pair of people seeking a 'heritage' that wouldn't even be here if it was here on this miserable excuse for a tomb that keeps growing annoyingly persistent life.**

As they strode to the edge of the cemetery, they came to an unmarked grave, something that made Rachel's eyebrow raise. 

_That wasn't here when we arrived._

The Shadow-woman grinned. **No, but it fits the theatrics of the thing, doesn't it? Resurrecting a corpse is easy. Creating a grave and summoning a spirit from a graveyard just for the sake of doing so? Now.....**

As she moved her hands and sounds began to echo that would have chilled the soul, dogs in a three mile vicinity began to howl and cats froze, fur standing on end. Even with the glamour concealing what was therein, lightning bolts struck a grave that had not existed beforehand not one but fourteen times, the lightning glowing with a greenish-silver iridescent tinge and striking the ground. Her hands moved in curious and eldritch patterns that did not conform to how flesh should logically move, runic patterns forming above the grave. Fourteen times did the corpse-lightning strike, and the runes that called forth the spirit that would make the bones move gleamed. A thing with glowing eyes and monstrous fangs briefly flashed into existence and then undulated into the ground, resting within the cadaver. 

The Shadow-woman stepped back and then the grave erupted upward in a shower of dirt, a figure standing up with glowing eyes and a prominent pair of extended canines, the body a thin greyish layer on prominently displayed bones. The pointer finger of the right hand had an enormous claw, the creature staring at it and then flashing its teeth in a low and echoing hiss. 

_Go now and rest until the sun sets, then go forth and enjoy yourself._

With that benediction from the Blackbird, the two cosmic entities vanished into a shimmering mirage like heat distortion. 

Karlee then reappeared over the city, hovering, scanning it with her own senses as Rachel manifested out of a smoke cloud to her right, likewise focusing. 

**I see them,** Karlee pointed, as she couldn't resist a giggle at the sight of the Terminator, Fateful Lightning, and Firewind hovering in what seemed like an equivalent of the old idea of Wonder Woman's invisible plane. 

**They're really trying hard to be like baseline mortals. See, you were worried for nothing.**

_You quite literally have summoned a vampire as a distraction._

**Yes, and that won't be their problem. They're not occult hunters, and they won't be bothered by the appearance of the Undead.**

_I fail to see why you're even making a vampire, sister. We are capable of erasing the entire planet here with a thought and leaving only the five of us standing in the empty vacuum of space. There are no weapons on this world capable of even putting a dent into our skin. We could just march into that doctor's office and flay his soul apart._

**No imagination, sister. That wouldn't be a story, that'd be the equivalent of 'The Shadow-woman came, she saw, she conquered" and I find that sort of thing boring. Mortals seldom draw our interest, but when they give us such delightful opportunities, well.....**

She looked upward at the sky. 

**I don't just want him to know he's been caught trying to fuck me. The rite he performed was a case of inviting us into a threshold as with a vampire. Our presence deforms worlds, and we carry with us the power to awaken ages of magic and to make the secret rites that operate in the realms metaphysical become all too real.**

Her smile was cold, cold as the flames from her eyes that cast strange effects on the ground beneath her. 

**And when worlds that know these things only in story see the first awakening to new power and to a power that goes from the realm of fiction to that of truth, from one stage of Dreaming to another.....it does tend to be a little messy.**

**I'll leave the cleanup of that as it starts rippling outward from here to our charming friends riding the magic invisible car. And that's not going to be a long wait, either.**

She smirked, and their eyes focused on a place to the west, where a person who fancied herself a witch opened a grimoire and decided that today was going to be a day where, after the fasting and preparation of food prior, she was going to try her hand at something different. A new kind of art, spirit conjuring. It was a holy thing to feel that power and to feel its presence.

So used was she to the perception of the invisible with second-sight that it did not dawn on her that the circle she had created was glowing not with the energetic-perception of the magic within the laws of physics, but a gleam of the Other-light that comes from the realms Beyond. So used was she to hearing with second-hearing that when a low and spectral murmur began to echo in tune with her breathing she took it as simply a more vivid than usual experience. 

Even the degree to which her apartment started to shake and things audibly rattled was dismissed as merely the work of imagination, as she began to speak the words of the incantation, moving her athame. The sound in tune with her breath intensified and then her eyes focused on what was not a second-sight motion of a portal opening, but a gleam of the light from Beyond that echoed with visions of vast spheres that lurked in another realm where a Tetrarchy of Four reigned. Mighty were its towers and infinitely strange its inhabitants, reality seeming more clear in their presence and in a wider range of clarity than any mortal vision allowed. She finished the incantation and spoke the name of that whom she was seeking to summon, Mam-mon. 

From that portal erupted a great clawed hand with reality distorting around it like the refraction of an object in a glass of water, then another. The claws were claws only by analogy, reality seeming to distort and jar. Yet vast as the hands were they fit within the circle, or more precisely the circle expanded to encompass the bulk of what pulled itself through the portal, squatting on forelimbs much larger and longer than the hind limbs. Loosely gorilla-like in shape, the thing was squamous, eighteen eyes that were milky and blinked in the inverse fashion that an eye should, the lid closing but exposing outwardly the gleam of the eye with it. The mouths were five-fold, each having five more mouths within it, all with wicked teeth that logically could not close together and yet did. Great horns extended from the head, the horns a silverbluish sheen that glowed with a strange hue that hurt her eyes. 

"Oh my God." 

_**Whichever version of that entity you speak to has nothing to do with this. I am a Lord of a Circle of Pandaemonium made in my image and in my likeness. You have summoned me here for those Greater than I, the New Children of Kelzhandar and its accursed Oath stride here and have brought forth wonders. You have summoned me in a circle, little witch.** _

_**Do you know what to do when the power you so regularly corralled in realms invisible to true-sight now is before you in all too real a form?** _

Stephany Naquin blinked, and then gulped, her mouth moving in a goldfish-like pattern, wondering what precisely kept this thing from ripping through the roof of her house with its horns. 

The thing leaned forward from the circle, all five mouths open and a saliva-like ichor splattering her face. 

_**Such sights for she who saw only with the mind's eye......** _


	3. The Devil in Disguise

IN A HOUSE ON LAKESHORE DRIVE:

The circle flared, the runes seemingly too puny to hold the great thing that squatted in them, its eyes, all of them gleaming with a sickly light, the thing's fractured essence one that was horrifying to behold.

Oh.....is the little sorceress terrified? You have sought and wielded, for a time, greater power than this as long as you did not truly see what you called upon.

The claw scraped at the circle's edge but its power held. Then the thing smiled and raised itself to its full height and the roof bulged and deformed and its head erupted outward as it unleashed a great and wondrous bellow, and from that bellow birds died, plants sickened, and three entities just down the street that had finished a quick and partially edible meal at a nearby restaurant whipped over to it.

Oh fuck me, groaned the man, and the women nodded.

We'll have to make this quick.

With the bellow's after-echoes stuck in her head, the thing that remained in the circle then looked her squarely in the eyes and she said "I....I gotta.....bye!"

With that the creature snarled and then stared more carefully. Its power had jostled one of the runes just enough, and as she ran down the stairs the entire front of the house was blown out by the creature slamming outward with its shoulder, another psychic-sonic bellow rippling outward as it propelled itself outward in a great leap, landing in the middle of Lakeshore Drive with a massive crunch, the impact sending ripples out into Lake Charles.

An SUV barreling straight for the thing slammed on the brakes but could not prevent a sickening impact that brought ruin not just to the vehicle and the bodies, but devoured the soul of those who, coming from the Chicago area to this part of the country to gamble, found that the personification of Greed itself devoured what it would and most appropriately. Other cars tried to escape and crashed into each other, the thing echoing with another tremendous boom right as a sudden rushing force followed and it faced not one but three entities who had changed. From seemingly normal human size, one was clad in plate armor of bright blue, eschewing the capes of the royal family, head encased in a helmet with a mitre-like shape to it.

Only her brilliant glowing eyes were similar to those of the Marianne-who-had-transformed in that motion. To her left was the towering metallic living war machine that bristled with nearly thirty-two turrets, all of which were glowing with terrible lights that led the creature to indecision. It remembered all too well how much those nova rays hurt not merely its incarnation but wounded its metaphysical essence. To his left there was a being clad in golden armor, her boots designed to fit vaguely dinosaurian feet. Her face was dark black, the hue of magma, a dinosaurian frill rising from her face and veined with lava. In her right hand she clutched a great sword that saw flame licking up it like a liquid until it glowed brilliantly.

Why are you here?

Same reason you are. 

It was the giant with the golden sword who spoke. Mammon snarled, a sound that spread still further the sickly elements of its presence and then leaped outward, bellowing only for all thirty-two turrets to strike it simultaneously with the nova rays, for Firewind to form chains of fire that struck the creature's burned and screaming form that had daemonic ichor splattered across the street and its bones cracked, every window in the area broken between the bellows and the impacts of the Nova rays, and the Fateful Lightning striding forward with her sword of fire.

We are not going to be working because of something like you.

Mammon's shrieks briefly became a horrid peal of laughter, a stacatto machine gun effect that led humans around to shudder and small hours of the morning to be dotted with the screams of nightmare.

Not I, no. Other things.....oh yes.

Then the blade lanced out and the creature of Pandaemonium's material shell collapsed and its essence returned to that realm.

Within less time than a lightning flash the three figures were human again and turned down past the Civic Center, leaving a busted-open house, a shaken would-be mage, and a cracked street where strange substances were splattered that did not crust or dry up like a normal liquid ought or could, where great claws and bootprints were engraved, and the strange flash of a monster that had emerged from a house, and three creatures that had appeared, one of which had cut off its head with a sword that blazed with a brilliant heat.

A cell phone video from a jogger at the park had caught the moment the creature had burst through the house and roared, and then when it had quite literally hurled itself through the house and leapt onto the street. The things that had appeared were only seen partially and briefly, all too large, as with the thing they destroyed, to quite be real. Too, there was the abnormal heat spike and the strange steam that had arisen from the lake, and which had evaporated a pool in a few nearby houses, leaving the cars that had collided melted and the damage done to the people whose vulnerable flesh was exposed to the terrifying heat little short of apocalyptic. 

The phone itself had been horrendously damaged, and it took two weeks of painstaking work by people trying to make sense of the changes in the world and where and how they had unfolded to make use of what was there. The continual weather anomalies for the first time drew the interest not just of satellites but of state and local authorities, as they were not true weather anomalies.

A voice had hesitantly wondered if this was a "Marvel or a DC movie" and then the dirty looks had silenced him. Somehow, in some way, monsters had come. Real monsters, powerful ones, too. It was not so nice as in the movies where civilian traffic on roads was mercifully absent. 

Yet somehow, within a matter of hours, the pucker factor from the scene had faded as an almost (the wiser said truly before forgetting along with the rest) supernatural calm settled on the aftermath, and life seemed to resume as normal bar the shattered roads next to the city and the devastating aftermath of the skirmish.

The rest of the day seemed to pass normally enough, and the three beings that had briefly shown a small portion of who and what they were, and what they could do, and how they could do it, spent an ordinary day at the beach, relaxing, though the lighter-skinned man and the white woman of the trio could not resist teasing the very dark-skinned redhead about certain ironies and if any had listened closely their voices all would have echoed with infrasound and other more exotic traces of distant and forgotten realms.

Night fell, a night that was chillier than normal, cold enough that what would have been rain became a light snowfall, and in that night a horror stalked. A man had heard what was seemingly his wife's voice, called to her, told her to come in to eat supper and then a thing had stalked up to the door that was neither his wife nor human nor any healthy and hallowed project of good and pleasant magick.

The discovery of a family of six rendered emaciated bloodless corpses with flesh on bones alone became a second scandal to match the first.

That evening, too, an opportunistic robber sought to raid a gas station when he saw a woman striding by and he had turned to look at her and he noticed two things. Her skin was a rich medium brown, average for a Black person in Louisiana, but her hair was a brilliant white, a hair that was not true hair for it obeyed no true laws of human biology and her eyes....her eyes were shining glowing white orbs. Her voice was not a single voice, but she seemed to command the shadows and in all of this, in everything else, the news began to ripple in paranormal communities.

There were legends, new and incorporating elements of old stories. Shadow-people. This Shadow-woman that had appeared when he had cased the place to rob it was not quite like the things of paranormal myth and lore. There was a hint of a second being, of deep billowing smoke with strange odors, and four glowing red eyes and a voice that echoed with resonances that were unhallowed products of Hell itself, but only hints. The one that he remembered vividly was the thing that had appeared and then she had walked through the walls, and stepped out with what was not things he intended to rob but products that were strange ones, things he could not quite place. Incense sticks, a bell, and it seemed that in that second moment when the billowing smoke and glowing eyes were there that she had not only looked at him and spoken to him again but that the face that looked at him was no longer human at all.

What was most terrifying of all was that the objects mentioned were indeed missing in the store's inventory, but the security camera had not merely melted, it had seemed to have materially unraveled and the terrified clerk had said only "The shadows, the shadows."

As their horror went about its work, the Shadow-woman and the Blackbird confirmed the protection of their citadel and their base, the incense sticks serving to augment things and to use less of their direct power. The bells would clang and clang like thunder if the entities that could challenge them would make their motions toward them, or toward challenging them and wherever they were, they would be audible.

The knife taken and remade into the athame was in the center of the realm, a lure for any mortals who could decipher things and break in. It was a gateway to realms that they could not have foreseen nor imagined.

This done, the Shadow-woman and the Blackbird took flight for the sheer joy of it, and a helicopter reported a strange encounter. A woman in a black slit prom dress and a being clad in a very strange garment like a character from a Star Wars film flying in the air, one with the most haunting blue eyes he'd ever seen....and the other with hair that did not move or flow as human hair would in a wind, let alone the draft of a helicopter, and pupilless eyes that were like glowing suns set in her face,

The paranormal community began to salivate, and helicopters and planes marked the sudden appearance of not merely paranormal investigators drawn by the reports of a swift and brutal clash of monsters and the visible impact of this clash and what was left over, and the scenes and speculation began to mount.

An editorial in the next day's American Press said that it hoped that there would prove to be mundane explanations for this, though it was impossible to provide them for melted cars, a house that was ripped open from the inside like an animal busting a cage, and both the camera dissolving and the reports from two people who had no encounter with each other or their report of a creature described in identical terms, though the four glowing eyes of the one case were the brilliant blue of the other. 

That morning, the three who could have answered the questions in full and terrifying detail shared a brief snorting "Ha" at each other and decided they were going to enjoy the parade and that was that. One could not gently move in the world with the full faces of all else that endured when one's true self perturbed multiverses in the way the gravitational effect of planets curved starlight around them. The parade, that day, and then they would see what monsters crawled out next when the reality that had existed imploded, and the monsters were no longer things esoteric and invisible, fears made real and horrifying in their effects, but entirely too real and able to rip out of and through houses as if they were nothing at all.


	4. Seven Veils:

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A couple with firearms try to play King of the Mountain with two figures walking on the road. Three entities in human form watch a parade and remain puzzled at the way mortals go about enjoying things. A vampire decides to enjoy some beef and horse.

Three incidents happened in one day that left the LCPD very confused, the CPSO still more confused, and began to draw in not just the FBI and DHS, but various sorcerers and occult specialists of all kinds.

ON THE LEFT SIDE OF COMMON STREET,NEAR CONTOUR STREET:

The first incident happened at 3:15 in the morning. In that timeframe, the edge of the city lit up with an eerie flash of light and then darkness seemed to bubble and flow and speak with a thousand voices, and two individuals had vanished never to be seen again.

At that time, two entities in human form had been satisfied after double and triple-checking wards that the task was done, and one of them had gone forth to give orders to its thrall, to seek new targets and unleashed it with a fond wave. The thing had flown forth in a great batlike form with ravenlike wings, a low thrumming sound. They had been walking since, enjoying the stars and talking quietly. Two people had staggered out of a bar, crashing a car into a telephone pole not much further down the street. They were not natives of the city, they had managed in spite of themselves to make it this close and yet this far to their hotel in spite of getting sloshed at a bar, but they were also smelling of booze, carrying guns in a disoriented manner and the woman bled from her head and her shoulder.

They saw two people standing at the side of the road, or entities that looked like people.

They seemed human enough, but there were no natural entities that had eyes that glowed like stars, or the skin of a-

The man raised his sawed off shotgun. "Hey you-" he bellowed a racial slur at the top of his lungs. "Your kind ain't belong here!"

The entity turned and stared directly at him across the street. He caught a full glimpse of its face, of her face. It seemed human, though no human hair was that white, and those eyes, those glowing starlight eyes.....

He opened fire, as did she. In that moment before the gunshots had a chance to ring out the creature made a sound, a gust of wind that was like a sigh and the bullets hang in mid-air. The flash of the gunshots was dispelled by a slight motion of the knuckle on her right hand, the bullets still spinning and unmade, becoming dust and metal, and then she smiled, speaking in a voice that smote reality by its sheer weight:

**You wasted my time for nothing, little rats.**

With that the flash of light that seemed to herald a powerful explosion of some kind and the silence that attended it that woke up half of Lake Charles followed.

VARIOUS FIELDS:

The thing that fell from the sky did so as an object man-sized but batlike, far larger than any bat known to have existed.

It stood on top of a stable and shrieked, an eerie whistling wail, before swooping down into the stable where its great claw flashed out. Wet and horrid sounds like the rending of meat followed, then great fangs echoed and it fastened itself on creatures, glutting itself on their blood. A simple tactic in the dead of night. Its presence in the first set of stables would be bemusing, presenting a case that neither Animal Control nor any kind of police nor military analysis could explain. Objects of steel were bent by a powerful grip, torn and mutilated, but not near as much as the animals that reacted in motion and swiftness, but to no avail.

The smell was powerful, the stench of fear and of the grave. Animal....and in a strange sense human.

A group of cattle in a field began to frantically moo and low and to try to run, awakened in the dead of night by a strange and foul odor that caused a drunk stumbling along the road to smell something very strange. Then the sound of butchery and a wet drinking sound followed, and the man stared in horror, blinking his eyes. A thing had descended from the sky like a great bird-winged bat out of hell, and as it finished with the cattle, glowing green eyes looking up from a mouth stained in blood. A weird whistling shriek and then something moved toward him.

The next morning a field of mutilated cattle were found drunk dry, sharing the strange jagged wounds on the neck with the horses, and a man's body was found, likewise drunk dry of blood and the area between chin and shoulders. Two fields had been attacked in the same night and a man was found dead. The nature of the wounds and of the changes to the corpses matched that of the horror that had struck the family.

News began to unironically use the term 'vampire' to speculate on the nature of the attacks. No proof or explanation of the blinding flash of light, the traces of gunpowder and firearms absent that presence, or of the two missing people who staggered out of a car wreck and seemed to vanish into thin air.

NEAR TUTEN PARK, 6:15 AM:

In the third case, which occurred later in the day, a sorcerer-aspirant who was beginning a course of magic study, who had paid close attention to the elements of summoning great power and the currents of energy work, and still greater to the strange flash that had occurred on Lakeshore Drive, was reading from a text. It was early in the morning and none else were around. He could feel the aetheric energies gathering, and to his shock there were visible traces, not merely in the Second Sight. The energies matched what his text said he should see, but the power was greater, like the gathering thunderclouds of a storm. Not so long ago, there had been a brilliant flash of light, some dreadful power at work. Three hours, to be precise.

That, after yesterday.

The sense of presence and power was vivid, and he did not notice the shadows bubbling and twisting around him and gazing with a thousand eyes, each a bright gleaming white star that seemed to gaze with intelligence, matched with a symbolism of four reddish gleams like two equal signs, as he watched the energetic storm gleaming over his head.

Speaking a finishing phrase he summoned the lightning, which struck the ground, leaving a sharp ozone smell.

The lightning reflected in his sunglasses and he smiled. Now the power was real. Now......now he could really get anything he wanted, as he wanted it.

Lightning flashes in Tuten Park on a cloudless day drew the attention of occultists, at first, and not the growing element of government agents and law enforcement officials. In retrospect overlooking that moment would loom very large indeed.

But only in retrospect.

 **Like father, like son,** the shadows burbled as he stepped away, having experimented with calling the lightning and forming light into various shapes, balls, people, beasts.

**How interesting. It seems the good doctor has encouraged his children to experiment.**

The voice of the four eyes sighed.

_I read those reactions. He's no wiser than the father._

**No he isn't.....is he?** Laughter echoed in mockery, and the shadows changed and became two figures who were humanoid. The one on the left with the glowing white eyes smiled a fanged grin, the other's expression stoic. In a distortion akin to a heat mirage they vanished into thin air as if they had never been.

LATER THAT DAY, KREWE OF KREWES PARADE:

Two people in the crowd had second-sight and kept staring at a group of three people. A Black man and woman, the woman with long red hair that flowed like magma, and eyes that seemed to take a reddish hue. The woman to the right seemingly European in appearance with eyes that were either green and normal human or glowing pools of brilliant greenish light and teeth that were great fangs. And a Black man who strongly resembled Michael Clark Duncan who when he revealed his own truth was a great hulking mountain of a tank in person form, one eye retaining a normal hue at points or matching the glowing machine-coloration of the other. A being neither machine nor man nor elements of both. This was weird but easy to attribute to simply seeing the personal selves of others beyond the Veil.

What was not so easy to explain was that the back of the truck they seemed to be seated upon was simple air and that they were seated on air much as a group of three would be seated on....the back of a truck. The woman on the left looked around with much wider eyed genuine curiosity, the woman on the right more bored in a genuine sense.

Floats were moving down the street, tossing beads, people were shouting in teetotal and drunken revelry. Music blared, too. The noise would have been overwhelming to some. To people to whom the Trombone of Death, the heralding sound of the onslaught of the God on the Gilded Throne, was the prelude to a hard day's work, it was no so much of a much.

 **To enjoy yourself for so little** , mused the woman on the left. **They love making fools of themselves.**

The Black man laughed. _**Oh come on, Yuri. They're Americans. We love making damn fools of ourselves. That, guns, beer, fireworks.....it's the national pasttime.** _

The paler woman snorted. _I thought seeing men swollen to look like sacks of muscle that go to all that trouble to hit a ball with a stick and still miss was the national pasttime_.

**The Black man laughed again. Nah, that's just the way people kill time. The real national pasttime of us here in these United States is guns, beer, people using guns and beer as excuses to be racist little shits. They think they can literally pull guns on people who look like me in the yards of our own houses and that people will defend anything they do, no matter how obscenely thin the excuse. One of many reasons I'm glad I've become greater than most gods, really.**

His eyes flashed a mechanical red.

_**My people gained power and we used it to overthrow our oppressors and we built a better world. They burned our cities and destroyed our wealth, destroyed our families. Mothers saw their children die in front of them, powerless to stop it. Fathers sundered from their families. Made from human beings into the white man's demons or his angels, no people anywhere. And then we gained a power not merely to fight back but a strength that the advantage in killing power they wielded no longer restrained us. The Blue Fire granted power first to those most wounded by evil. The peoples here first gained them at the very beginning, then us. And we remade the world we lived in.** _

_**Here, my people do not have that kind of power. But here, I'll be damned if I'll just sit on thin air and enjoy all this and not take a few steps.** _

The woman on the right cocked her head slightly, licking her lips.

**Well, we did come here for a vacation.**

_**Vacation? Hell, I've got the power to upend the entire laws of physics here. Making it so my people are freed and they do it as themselves, not reliant on some divine archetype to be a messiah and a repository of dead dreams and failed hopes? Like the white man's god? Well......** _

He cracked his knuckles.

_**That ain't work. That's justice, is what that is. Parade today, freedom soon enough.** _

Both of the women nodded, and they watched more of the floats going down.

Marianne's eyes widened and flashed bright green for a moment in first as well as second sight.

_That woman is literally baring her-_

She blinked.

_Wow. Well she does have.....nice ones, I suppose. Doesn't seem to get them more beads. Or arrests for obscenity._

**Nah, it's Mardi-Gras, Marianne. Laws are a little looser here. For everybody.**

They watched the parade in relative silence after that. They did raise their hands a few times and caught some beads. Stoic and bemused Yuri caught a really gaudy set of purple, green, and gold with harlequin medallions, and with an impish smile put it around her neck.

**_Give this a little reinforcement for my fires and maybe I'll surprise Tam with it when we get back._ **

Vincent laughed. **Yeah, you, big scary Muspel-Jotunn showing up with that on your neck. Know what babe? Do it. I want to see the look on her face.**

When the parade ended they returned to their hotel room.

That evening, as they looked at the mirror, it rippled and began to glow and thrum with a deep bass resonance.

**Oh boy. Tam's calling.**

With that, they looked cautiously at the mirror, and it seemed to become a portal to another realm much deeper on the inside.

They were looking at a throneroom with seven thrones in a great circle, one in the center, the other six in a circle around it. It was that central throne that illuminated itself, and another to the right behind it gleaming with a figure of pale skin with dark hair and glowing eyes. Those traits were shared with the titan on that throne, a being clad in bright grey armor with a black ankh on her breastplate. Parts of a bright blue loincloth over the armor were visible at her hips and pooling between her feet. Her Presence stamped itself on reality to a point that the Earth's presence in spacetime registered a mere glance of hers from a scrying mirror.

She was immensely tall and broad, only vaguely human by analogy, in this form (Vince found himself wishing it had been her in her human form darker skinned than he was, but one couldn't have everything when her siblings were involved, especially that one). This form, with its bone-hued skin, nine golden suns in her face, each with an Eye of Horus-like marking beneath them, with the tips of pointed bone-hued ears, and her hair displaying streaks of light blue like tiger stripes, emphasized how like in a way she was to their great foe. Of course they were siblings, of the same culture, even. One at the dawn, the other at the end.

The Hammer of Doom, Dancer of the Light, the Tyrantbane, the Blood-Harvester, the End of All Things Mortal looked at them, her eyes narrowing and then widening at the sight of the gaudy necklace around Yuri's face. With a slight nod and shrug she made no further comment then.

Then she leaned forward, her mouth opening and the impact of her glance on the Earth's orbit was magnified by the impact of her speech.


End file.
